The Internal Revenue Service has been under fire for delays and millions of backlogged returns, but now lawmakers are raising the alarm after the federal agency “destroyed” millions of Americans’ tax documents.
Republicans on the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig this week asking for answers about why these records were destroyed.
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Border authorities in Texas seized 22 pounds of fentanyl worth $339,300 that a smuggler was attempting to drive into the U.S. on Wednesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) announced.
The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) says that 2 milligrams of fentanyl can be enough to kill a person, 22 pounds is 9,979,032 milligrams. Applying the DEA’s own metrics, this means the latest seizure is enough to kill 4,989,516 people.
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The Biden administration has rebooted the Energy Department’s green loan program that lent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in the Obama-era to the now-defunct green energy company, Solyndra, according to an announcement.
The Advanced Clean Energy Storage project in Utah will receive the loan, leaving $2.5 billion for other clean energy projects, the Department of Energy (DOE) stated Wednesday.
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President Joe Biden’s top adviser on environmental issues called on technology companies to censor debates on environmental issues and energy policy during a Thursday event.
“The tech companies have to stop allowing specific individuals over and over again to spread disinformation,” White House National Climate Advisor Gina McCarthy, a former EPA Administrator, said during a virtual event, according to Axios. “We need the tech companies to really jump in.”
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The Satanic Temple was included on a list of participants of a “kid friendly” LGBTQ+ “Pride in the Park” event in Idaho—which includes a “drag dance party”—until Libs of Tik Tok publicized their involvement on Twitter.
A member of the Satanic group claimed to have pulled out of the Saturday event after several sponsors apparently dropped out due to their participation.
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America is one of the most welcoming nations on the planet, but you would never know it listening to our mass media. An unceasing avalanche of contempt for Americans and their “racist” and “backward” ways flows from the mouths of liberal talking heads on cable news. It is particularly maddening to listen to this talk from recently arrived immigrants in positions of power and influence. The likes of U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ana Navarro on “The View,” and MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan have done very well for themselves in the United States, but they don’t do a very good job of showing their gratitude.
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NASA on Thursday announced plans to create a scientific study starting this Fall to investigate “unidentified aerial phenomena,” also known as UFOs.
The space agency stressed in a press release that there is no evidence showing that the aircraft are of extra-terrestrial origins.
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For decades, states like New York, California and Illinois have evidently been paying a high price for allowing dues-hungry labor union bosses to continue getting workers fired for refusal to bankroll their organizations. Year after year, far more taxpayers have been leaving forced-unionism states than have been moving into them. The cumulative loss of taxpayers has been cutting into their revenue bases.
Recently released data from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) indicate the cost of forced unionism soared by more than 50% in the Tax Filing Year 2019, compared to the year before.
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A government watchdog has discovered that over 1,800 government scientists received 27,244 royalty payments from 2009 to 2016, amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars in a seven-year time span.
Fox News reports that the findings were the result of a lawsuit filed against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by OpenTheBooks.com. The watchdog had sued the NIH after the agency allegedly stonewalled their Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. As a result, the NIH agreed to share their bookkeeping on royalties, although they redacted the total amount of individual payments, as well as the inventions, and the third parties who actually paid the royalties.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin, Senators Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Warner (D-VA), and Representative Don Beyer (D-VA-08) spoke at a Monday ceremony celebrating Boeing’s relocating its headquarters to Arlington and its partnership with Virginia Tech’s Innovation Campus in Arlington.
Youngkin said that when Boeing announced its move to Virginia in May, “I was particularly proud because when we went to work on January 15, we talked about Virginia being open for business. We talked about Virginia raising standards and expectations and education. We talked about Virginia being the best place for our veterans to live and work and raise a family.”
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The Biden Administration’s State Department is soon going to announce the establishment of a “Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice” on June 17th, a leaked email reveals.
According to the Daily Caller, the position was first announced in April by the State Department’s own “Equity Action Plan. But the newly-obtained email reveals more details about the power that the position will have, including “institutionaliz[ing] an enterprise-wide approach to integrating racial and ethnic equity.” The email also declares that “advancing equity, addressing systemic racism, and strengthening democracy worldwide” will be considered “national security imperatives and core tenets of President Biden’s foreign policy.”
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The Government Accountability Office on Wednesday revealed that Boeing is having trouble finding qualified workers for its nearly $5 billion Air Force One project. Thanks to COVID-related delays and retirements, the project is understaffed and behind schedule. The aviation giant has already lost $1.1 billion on the deal, which was contracted in 2018 at a fixed price of $3.9 billion and may not be finished until mid-2025.
Not just any warmblood with a wrench can walk in and get a job assembling the president’s jet. Due to the top-secret nature of the aircraft – actually, two specially converted 747-8s that the Air Force officially designates as the VC-25B – anyone working on the project needs to undergo an in-depth background check for a security clearance.
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Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona criticized proposals to arm teachers to stop school shootings during a Thursday appearance on “The View.”
“Those are some of the stupidest proposals I’ve heard in all my time as an educator,” Cardona said when asked about arming teachers by co-host Sunny Hostin. “So that’s my answer to that. Listen. We need to make sure we’re doing sensible legislation, making sure our schoolhouses are safe as much as possible, but to say that we’re going to arm teachers to protect students, what happens when a teacher goes out on maternity leave?”
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CNBC editor Rick Santelli unloaded on the Biden administration on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday morning, saying anti-fossil fuel policies helped to spur inflation.
“What was the forward guidance with this administration on energy?” Santelli asked. “We know the answer. Maybe they can’t get things to happen faster, but by giving positive forward guidance, by not closing pipelines, by not talking pre-election about how much they don’t like fossil fuel, maybe things would have turned out a bit different.”
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Foreign investment in U.S. farmland has tripled in the past 10 years, reporters at a non-profit investigative journalism group found.
Investigate Midwest used U.S. Department of Agriculture data to call attention to this trend. Farmer Joe Maxwell, co-founder of the group Farm Action, told The Center Square that control of U.S. farmland by foreign investors is worrisome on a number of fronts.
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This summer, Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) is conducting a six-week summer session that trains college students to unionize for social justice in their workplaces.
Titled “Red Hot Summer,” the training will give “give young workers the tools to organize their workplace and discuss how the labor movement can play a role in winning fights against racism, sexism, homophobia, climate change, and imperialism,” according to the YSDA website.
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On Wednesday, he Department of Defense (DOD) announced recently that it had updated its guidelines regarding the recruitment of potentially HIV-positive individuals, now opening the door to letting people with the deadly disease serve in the military.
As reported by the Daily Caller, the DOD said that any members who test positive for the virus may continue to serve so long as they do not display any clear symptoms, according to a department memo that was recently made public.
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Food prices in the U.S. may get worse in the coming months as European Union countries predict a dismal wheat harvest on top of the loss in Ukraine’s wheat exports, The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.
The EU may produce 5% less wheat than 2021 because of dry weather, agriculture consulting firm Strategie Grains told the WSJ.
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Over the next nine years, more than half of the stadiums in the National Football League will reach 30 years of age, or the age at which stadiums are generally replaced, according to economist J.C. Bradbury of Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
The model for replacement is trending more toward the taxpayer-supported efforts being pitched for the Tennessee Titans and Buffalo Bills than it is strictly team-owner funded stadiums such as the $5 billion SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, home of the Chargers and Super Bowl-champion Rams.
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Unfunded state pension liabilities have climbed to $8.28 trillion, or nearly $25,000 for every person in the United States, according to a new report from the American Legislative Exchange Council.
The American Legislative Exchange Council released the latest edition of its report on pensions in all 50 states Thursday. The report, “Unaccountable and Unaffordable 2021,” shows just a handful of states with outsize pension liabilities account for a large share of overall pension debt in the U.S.
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Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin finished atop the Alaska special Republican congressional primary in early results released Sunday, advancing to the general election in the race to succeed the late Rep. Don Young.
Palin, who was endorsed by former President Donald Trump, finished atop the field of 48 candidates with nearly 30% of the early ballots counted, followed by fellow Republican Nick Begich at 19.3%, surgeon Al Gross, an independent, and Democratic state legislator Mary Peltola at about 7.5%.
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The 2022 United States Senate elections can best be thought of as the classic battle between the irresistible force and the immovable object. The irresistible force is the playing field. President Joe Biden’s job approval in the RCP Average is currently 39.7%, the lowest of his presidency. That’s about 3.5 points lower than Barack Obama’s job approval was on (midterm) Election Day 2010. President Obama’s job approval only dipped to 40% briefly, in the immediate aftermath of the botched Obamacare rollout, and it never dropped below 40%. President Donald Trump’s job approval spent much of 2017 below this mark, but in the terrible Republican election year of 2018, it never fell this low.
In other words, this is shaping up to be a worse environment than either of the last three midterms, all of which were nightmares for the party in power.
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Columbia University’s School of Nursing certificate program in “Transgender Non-Binary Health Care for Advanced Practice Nurses and PAs” is launching for the fall 2022 semester.
Students will learn “pubertal suppression, hormone therapy, gender affirming surgical care, sexual health and fertility, as well as writing letters of support, and care planning for surgery,” according to the university website.
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American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten was paid nearly half a million dollars during the 2021-2022 school year, a report from Americans for Fair Treatment stated Wednesday. Weingarten raked in six-figures while simultaneously pushing for schools to stay shutdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
With teacher’s union dues, Weingarten is paid $449,562, the Americans for Fair Treatment report stated. Weingarten’s salary is about seven times more than the average high school teacher makes as of 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor.
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House Republicans are touting $3 billion of direct aid for education in the Fiscal Year 2023-2024 budget that Governor Glenn Youngkin is currently reviewing. Key education items include over $1 billion in grants and loans for school construction and modernization, and two five-percent raises for teachers and other state employees. It also includes $45 million for school resource officers.
House Appropriations Chair Barry Knight (R-Virginia Beach) said education spending in the budget is higher than pre-recession levels, even accounting for current inflation levels.
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The U.S. military depends almost completely on China for a mineral essential to the production of ammunition and other defense products, Defense News reported Wednesday.
The House Armed Services Committee released draft legislation on Wednesday which would require a briefing on the antimony supply by October and a five-year outlook on supply chain vulnerabilities, Defense News reported. The U.S. has no domestic mine for the mineral antimony, which is reportedly used in the production of night vision goggles, armor-piercing bullets, explosives and nuclear weapons.
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Jim Seals, co-founder of internationally successful soft-rock duo Seals and Crofts (pictured above, left), died on Monday, after a lingering illness following a stroke in 2017. Seals, who had homes in Costa Rica and Hendersonville, Tennessee, is believed to have been at his Tennessee home at the time of his passing.
The duo’s primary success came in the years between 1972 and 1977, though hits such as “Get Closer,” “Diamond Girl,” and “We May Never Pass This Way Again” have since become woven into the fabric of popular culture, continuing to permeate classic-pop formats across the board.
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I recently led a group of about 100 citizens to tour Israel for nearly two weeks. Before returning to the United States, all participants had to indicate their vaccination status and take a COVID-19 test for reentry.
Anxieties swept the group as Israeli testers swabbed them.
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Elon Musk recently tweeted, “population collapse is the biggest threat to civilization.”
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Five House Republicans voted with Democrats to pass a gun control package Wednesday evening that would raise the purchasing age to buy a semi-automatic firearm to 21 if signed into law.
The majority of House Republicans voted against the Protecting Our Kids Act introduced by Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York, which sought to raise the purchasing age of people buying semi-automatic rifles to 21, mandate gun owners store their firearms in a safe and increase regulation on bump stocks. Republican Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, Chris Jacobs of New York, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Fred Upton of Michigan joined Democrats in voting to pass the bill.
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In 1939, William S. Hart, a Shakespearean actor from New York who had been a key player in the making of Hollywood 20 years earlier, and for a time was considered its biggest silent star by virtue of filming “western” melodrama in a signature gritty and realistic style, re-released his 1925 silent epic “Tumbleweeds.” With it he offered a spoken introduction that was a sad farewell to both his own career and to the genre he had helped establish. This same year also saw the release of “Stagecoach,” John Ford’s benchmark. “Tumbleweeds” was a depiction of the actual opening of the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma by the U.S. government only 50 years before and, to Hart’s mind, the end of the Western epoch. But the “western,” as we now know it, had just been re-born.
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A Kansas native admitted to organizing an all-female militia on behalf of ISIS in an Alexandria, Virginia, court on Tuesday.
Allison Fluke-Ekren pleaded guilty before a U.S. district court in Virginia for providing “material support to a foreign terrorist organization, namely the Islamic state of Iraq and al-Sham,” according to court documents.
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On Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a warning about a “heightened threat environment” ahead of the coming midterm elections in November.
The Daily Caller reports that the warning was made in a bulletin released by the department, “regarding the continued heightened threat environment across the United States.”
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Over 82 million COVID-19 vaccine doses have been wasted since the start of the pandemic, including roughly 11% distributed by the federal government, according to the Center for Disease Control.
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Former Interior Department Secretary Ryan Zinke narrowly won the Republican primary to represent Montana’s District 1 in the U.S. House.
Zinke, whom former President Donald Trump endorsed, beat his opponent, Al Olszewski, by just over 1,600 votes, or 41.7% to 39.8%, according to the Associated Press.
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Senator Bryce Reeves (R-Spotsylvania) is leading in the latest fundraising reports in the VA-07 GOP primary. In reports earlier this spring, Derrick Anderson led the field, showing him to be a serious contender, but Reeves is now at $680,511, while Anderson is at $599,324, according to data compiled by The Virginia Public Access Project.
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Governor Glenn Youngkin formally received the budget on Thursday, launching a seven-day timeline to review the budget and amend or veto parts of the bill, but the current budget ends at the end of June, creating a tight timeline.
The budget with his changes must be available for 48 hours before the General Assembly votes on it.
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Virginia politics author Jeff Thomas has filed a lawsuit against Department of Elections officials to try to force new House of Delegates elections in 2022. He argues that elections held last year on old lines leave him and other voters under-represented.
“Defendants have deliberately played games with the Court and the people’s rights for political reasons,” Thomas’ states in his lawsuit against Elections Commissioner Susan Beals and State Board of Elections Chairman Robert Brink.
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According to reports citing Nielsen ratings, which keeps track of television viewership, primetime viewership of the first January 6 Committee hearing totaled more than 19 million across all networks.
Nielsen said that ABC’s coverage totaled 4.8 million viewers, the highest of any network, while NBC’s coverage has 3.5 million viewers and CBS’s coverage had 3.3 million viewers.
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A former apostolic nuncio, or papal ambassador, to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò has warned Catholics that several of the bishops Pope Francis has recently elevated to the College of Cardinals support leftwing causes and oppose the Church’s traditional Latin, or Tridentine, Mass.
“Pope Francis has chosen his new cardinals for their ‘corruptibility,’” the outspoken Viganò wrote at LifeSiteNews last week.
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This week produced yet another example of the shameless collaboration between the U.S. Department of Justice, the Democratic Party, and the national news media to destroy Donald Trump and everyone around him. The ink was barely dry on the not guilty verdict for Michael Sussmann, just one of many figures who acted as a pass-through between Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the FBI to manufacture the Russia collusion hoax, before the same players were up to their old tricks.
Members of the January 6 select committee blanketed the Sunday news programs last weekend promising bombshell revelations would shake the nation during a primetime hearing Thursday night. Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told CBS News’ Robert Costa the committee would present findings to show an “extremely broad . . . extremely well-organized” conspiracy to overthrow the government that day. What the committee uncovered related to the alleged conspiracy, Cheney warned, is “really chilling.’
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Despite the arrest Wednesday of an armed man who allegedly claimed he intended to kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended not passing a House bill seeking to increase security for the justices’ homes, and gruffly responded to a reporter, “I don’t know what you’re talking about … nobody is in danger.”
On Thursday – just one day after 26-year-old Nicholas John Roske was arrested near Kavanaugh’s home and then charged with attempted murder of a Supreme Court justice – Pelosi was about to leave her weekly press conference when she responded brusquely to a reporter who shouted out to her, “You said the justices are protected, but there was an attempt on Justice Kavanaugh’s life.”
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Politically progressive professors who use physical force to shut down opposing views pose no greater threat — and maybe less — than conservative faculty who express views that challenge campus orthodoxy, years of university actions suggest.
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We humans are social animals, with society serving as the glue that binds us together. Through our ideals, ethics, and actions, we all have a hand in forming the collective views of society. “Work hard”, “take care of your family”, “don’t commit crime”, are a few basic tenets. But sometimes, often when faced with something novel, society can panic. Rather than try to understand this new trend or thing, frenzied members might view it as a threat and seek to banish it. Sociologists call these moments “moral panics”. More often than not, they’re irrational, with little to no support from scientific evidence. Here are four moral panics not backed by science:
1. Dungeons & Dragons. In the 1980s, spurred by a few attention-grabbing incidents, the media, politicians, and many prominent members of society glommed on to the idea that the tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) was driving players to psychosis, suicide, and even murder. The fantasy game has players cooperatively imagine themselves as a party of heroes (or villains) in a magical world filled with demons, beasts, and spells.
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The Consumer Price Index for May was 8.6%, compared to 12 months ago, the Labor Department reported Friday.
The monthly increase is the highest since 1981, as was the March number.
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The Biden administration is planning to start funding the transport of migrants from border towns to cities across the country, NBC News reported Wednesday.
The plan, which will start in the coming weeks, will involve sending migrants to Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Albuquerque and elsewhere, according to NBC News, which obtained internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents. DHS is coordinating with local shelters to support the migrants in those cities before they make their way to other areas of the country on their own.
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Do something.
This is a response—and perhaps a natural one—to a human tragedy or crisis. We saw this response in the wake of 9-11. We saw it during the Covid-19 pandemic. And we’re seeing it again following three mass shootings—in Buffalo, New York, Uvalde, Texas, and Tulsa Oklahoma—that claimed the lives of more than 30 innocent people, including small children.
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GOP nominee in VA-08 Karina Lipsman wants to focus on public safety, the economy, education, and mental health. Lipsman is battling Representative Don Beyer (D-VA-08) in a deep-blue district, and was nominated at the end of May in a ranked-choice convention. “We live in Northern Virginia. We don’t live in,…
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The average price for a gallon of gas nationwide has reached the the $5 threshold, according to Thursday reports.
“According to GasBuddy, the national average has reached $5 per gallon,” said GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan.
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The FBI deceived the House, Senate and the Justice Department about the substance and strength of evidence undergirding its counterintelligence investigation of President Trump, according to a recently declassified document and other material.
A seven-page internal FBI memo dated March 8, 2017, shows that “talking points” prepared for then-FBI Director James Comey for his meeting the next day with the congressional leadership were riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods, and critical omissions. Both the Senate and the House opened investigations and held hearings based in part on the misrepresentations made in those FBI briefings, one of which was held in the Senate that morning and the other in the House later that afternoon. RealClearInvestigations reached out to every member of the leadership, sometimes known as the “Gang of Eight.” Some declined to comment, while others did not respond to queries.
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